Thursday, August 11, 2011

We love to get rid of links off the navigation bar. It just feels so...liberating. :) It's a rare occurrence that we get to do it, but this is one of them. There used to be two links on the right side of the nav: "Manage questions" and "Ask a question."

With the introduction of our new discussion capability, things were getting tight. We also felt like the "manage questions" link was pretty redundant with what's already in the "questions" link - the only thing missing were a couple additional sorts to show you your pending or submitted questions.

So instead of keeping that link around, we've removed it and now if you go to to the questions page, you'll see a new link:

This will now list all your questions and discussions that are currently running or you've submitted. Click on any of them and go to admin/edit to do whatever you want with them.

For administrators, there's still a manage questions link, but it's moved up in to the "admin options" menu item in the top right:

In watching companies run a lot of marketplaces, we've noticed that a key success factor is to have a healthy bit of back and forth in the discussion threads associated with each question. While many players are competitive and want to be accurate predictors, most of us are also social animals and like to engage in a good back and forth. We decided to build on this and introduce the ability to JUST start a discussion thread on its own without being associated with a question.

Publishing a discussion is a familiar process. You are asked the topic/question you'd like people to discuss, fill out some details and any background information you'd like to provide and submit for publication. The discussions themselves look just like the discussion threads we already have so they'll be familiar to everyone.